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Analysing the prospect of revolution by
China’s oppressed peasants, Chairman Mao once wrote that a
single spark can start a prairie fire. The recent
internet-assisted uprising in Tunisia that led its long-time
ruler Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali to flee the country may now
make other autocratic Arab rulers wonder if it is the time
of a single tweet that will start a prairie fire in their
lands. At the Arab League meeting this week, its secretary
general warned that the tinder was dry. “The Arab soul,” he
said, “is broken by poverty, unemployment and general
recession…The Arab citizen has entered a stage of anger that
is unprecedented.”
It is the first time in history that an Arab
ruler has been chased out of power by street demonstrations,
and that too without any organisation by a political party.
The sheer disgust at the corrupt and repressive regime
brought out thousands of men and women to face the army and
police. Is it the first Facebook or Twitter revolution? Was
Ben Ali the first victim of the WikiLeaks revelations? Or
was it a victory for the hacker-activists or hacktivists as
they are known?
The protests were preceded by a cyber war
fought between the government censors and Tunisian and
foreign hacktivists. As the government had total control of
the media, the ingenious opponents fought back with proxy
servers, virtual private networks and encryption. Images of
violent suppression uploaded via thousands of YouTube clips,
often relayed on Al Jazeera, were watched by angry citizens
who coordinated protests with tens of thousands of Twitter
messages an hour. The power of the internet was recognised
by the emerging new power when a 33-year-old dissident
blogger, Slim Amamou, was selected as the minister of youth
and sports in the new interim government. Only days earlier,
Amamou was handcuffed to a chair in the ministry of
interior, subjected to psychological torture for a week.
The airing of the leaked US cables that
detailed the revulsion of foreign governments for the
country’s venal rulers may have added to the situation’s
combustibility. The regime’s opponents set up a site
TuniLeaks.org to aggregate and translate WikiLeaks cables
about the Ben Ali regime’s corruption and human rights
violations – the cables that the regime sought to block. One
cable summing up the venality of Ali and his family was
headlined ‘What’s Yours Is Mine’. The US ambassador wrote,
“Whether it’s cash, services, land, property, or yes, even
your yacht, President Ben Ali’s family is rumored to covet
it and reportedly gets what it wants.”
When the regime sought to blunt the media
campaign by hacking into Facebook accounts and deleting
critical material, international supporters of Tunisian
bloggers mobilised. The ‘Anonymous’ retaliated by their
‘Operation Tunisia’ – a massive denial of service attack on
Tunisian government sites. But the real spark came when
Mohamed Bouazizi, a university graduate, set himself on fire
in protest after police confiscated his unlicensed fruit and
vegetable cart. Despite, or perhaps because of the brutal
repression that killed nearly a hundred people, the protests
swelled. In the end, when the army chief refused to shoot on
civilians, the game was over for the fifth-term president.
Ironically, it was Ben Ali who, in a bid to
promote business, invested in one of the most advanced fiber
optic grids in North Africa. Thirty-four per cent of the
Tunisian population uses the internet and 15% is on Facebook.
Despite tough censorship, existence of this network gave
opponents of the regime the opportunity to use tricks like
proxies, encryption and virtual private networks to
communicate with the world and upload searing images on
YouTube.
The internet and social media played a
critical role but the spark lit by the self-immolation of
the student would not have ignited the prairie fire had the
ground not been dry. It was the accumulated anger of two
decades of exploitation and corruption brought to the
surface by high unemployment (14%), especially among the
young (about 30% of the jobless are between age 15 and 29),
that provided the flammable mix. The repressed pressure of a
muzzled country found its release on the Web, fanning the
fire.
Courtesy Times of India |
